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Software development is hard. No matter what the end product, many of the same stumbling blocks come up time and again and get in the way of project success. Some classic pitfalls include time restraints, insufficient in-house resources, scope creep, and spiraling development costs. So how do software developers minimize these obstacles and improve their chances for better, faster, more cost-effective software development?

What's better than an ActivePerl release? Two, of course! We've updated both ActivePerl tracks (one for users who have moved to Perl 5.10, the other for folks who rely on Perl 5.8).

ActivePerl 5.8.8.824 has lots of new goodies and loads of new modules—a year's worth! Waaay too many to list here, so you'd best check out our docs. Or, throw caution to the wind, and just download it and see for yourself!

[Blogging while the ActiveState web site goes through a bit more reorganization...]

First, Komodo snippets let you prepare boilerplate snippets of code that you can quickly insert into programs while writing them. For example, if you're writing a JavaScript component, you can type 'namespace', press Ctrl-T (default binding), and end up with this:

Hard to believe it's already the middle of August..and the end of the official summer months. How do I make myself feel better about the inevitable change in seasons? Well, I curl up on my chaise lounge and read a success story about another happy ActiveState customer.

I blogged about my Tabhunter Firefox extension a couple of weeks ago, and then on second thought decided to postpone the announcement until the AMO (addons.mozilla.org) accepted my submission. So here it is. The extension's at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7924 - the details...I blogged about my Tabhunter Firefox extension a couple of weeks ago, and then on second thought decided to postpone the announcement until the AMO (addons.mozilla.org) accepted my submission. So here it is.

One of the cooler things ActiveState did very early on was create the Cookbooks section of our ASPN site. The formula was simple: users submitted, commented on and rated chunks of re-usable code. In particular the Python section formed the basis for O'Reilly's 'Python Cookbook' book. Unfortunately the other cookbooks never quite caught on the same way that the Python one did, and the web application powering the cookbooks ended up being fairly brittle and hard to maintain.

Our PPM build server infrastructure has been very maintenance intensive; it needed some manual tweaking and fixing on a weekly basis. We finally couldn't stand doing it any longer and turned them off a couple of weeks ago. The PPM repositories are still there, but they're not being updated anymore.

But fear not! We took the time saved from having to do all the build monitoring and fixing and started writing a new simplified build system that avoids many of the problems the old one runs into.

Komodo 4.4 is out today! Komodo does amazing things, practically a kitchen sink of tools, but hopefully a whole lot more portable. There's a number of improvements, but my favorite is the new SCC commit dialog and the Change list panel. We did a recent survey and found that 65% of visitors to ActiveState.com feel that having a